Colors of Vancouver

December 20, 2021
Jessla Varaparambil Abdul Kadher

Introduction

Motivation

As someone born and brought up in a country where you get tropical weather, when I moved to vancouver one of the things that intrigued me was the beautiful spring bloom and fall foliage. When I googled the images for spring bloom and fall colors, it showed some beautiful pictures of vancouver streets with some amazing colors.
So, when I got the dataset, I thought it would be interesting to investigate and find out the locations where I could go and experience this by doing the analysis.

cherry blossom.jpg

Fig 1. Spring Bloom

fall foliage.jpg

Fig 2. Fall Foliage

Questions of Interest

Since we are trying to find the street and block where the colors are as seen in the figures above. The following questions are of interest for this project work

1. Find out the Neighbourhoods where the Fall Foliage and Spring Blooms mostly observed
2. Find out the streets in which the Fall Foliage and Spring Bloom are dominant is in the same neighbourhood from question 1.
3. Confirm for a street if the blocks in which they are located are close to each other

Analysis

Filtering the Data

The libraries needed for this analysis are imported as shown,

The data set is read and stored as follows. Since, we are looking to find trees along the streets of Vancouver, we would filter the dataset for the trees located near the curbs, we would also filter the dataset for the columns that are of interest to us.

The columns which we are interested in, does not contain any null values.

The dataset gives Genus name, species name and common name for each trees in Vancouver. For our analysis the Vancouver tree data set is read and filtered for fall and spring genuses. Doing the analysis either on the basis of species name or common name is out of the scope this work. The fall and spring genuses are categorized into 2 lists manually for fall and spring genuses, and then the filtering for the dataframe is done.List of genuses for spring are stored in a list named list_flowering. Similarly, list of genuses for fall are stored in a list named list_decidous

Next step is filtering the dataframe to get dataframes for fall and spring

The neighbourhoods where the Fall Foliage and Spring Blooms mostly observed

By visualizing the data in a map would be the best way to find out which all neighbourhoods have the best fall and spring colors. The geojson for Vancouver is available through a url. This was obtained from the Vancouver Data Portal. To make a base map of Vancouver we use the geojson url saved in url_geojson.

To obtain the map the dataset is grouped based on the neighbourhood data and the genus and coordinate values are aggregated as follows. First we would do it for the Spring dataset and do the same for the fall dataset as well.

A selection for neighbourhood name is added as follows, which allows us to hover over the map to highlight the individual neighbourhood which we are interested. The map is obtained for the spring as follows..

To obtain the individual genus counts for each neighbourhood, a scatter plot is obtained from the original spring data set and is combined with the vancouver spring map.

The above process is repeated for the fall dataset as well, the grouped fall dataset is as shown below

The vancouver fall map is as given below

Next is the genus scatter for the fall

For the given dataset, from the above plots its clear that, From the plots it can be seen the top 5 neighbourhoods with most fall genuses on the streets are 'Kensington-Cedar Cottage', 'Renfrew-Collingwood', 'Hastings-Sunrise', 'Victoria-Fraserview', 'Dunbar-Southlands', 'Sunset', and similarly for spring the neighbourhoods are 'Renfrew-Collingwood', 'Hastings-Sunrise', 'Kensington-Cedar Cottage', 'Victoria-Fraserview', 'Sunset', 'Dunbar-Southlands'. If someone is visiting vancouver, I would recommend to visit these neighbourhood get the most of the vancouver colors!

The most common genuses for the fall and spring are obtained from the following bar plots

For further analysis the most common genuses for fall and spring will be looked upon to find the streets with most colours.
For fall these genuses would be ACER, PRUNUS, FRAXINUS, TILIA, CARPINUS, QUERCUS, FAGUS, MALUS, MAGNOLIA, CRATAEGUS.
For Spring these genuses would be PRUNUS, MALUS, MAGNOLIA, CRATAEGUS, PYRUS.

Finding the streets for the best Fall and Spring colors

For doing further analysis, it is needed to filter the spring and fall dataframes based on the common genuses for spring and fall found in the previous session.

Also, it would be a good idea to observe the common genus distribution in each neighbourhood for fall and spring.
The common genus distribution for spring is plotted.

The common genus distribution for fall is as follows..

By grouping the data by neighbourhood_name, genus_name and on_street columns we get the streets in which we have the most color.
Also, we would limit our analysis to streets with more than 25 counts, to make it easier for us to plot for analysis.

Similar grouping and counting is done for fall

According to the given data, going to these streets would give us the most fall and spring colors. The top 5 streets for the fall colors are  W 6TH AV, W 11TH AV, W 15TH AV, KINGSWAY and ANGUS DRIVE. And similarly from the given dataset the top 5 streets where spring bloom is observed are W 59TH AV, DUMFRIES ST, W 22ND AV, RUPERT ST and DUMFRIES ST.

From the above plot the most number of genuses per street distribution is observed. Tre dropdown menu is giving us the provision to check if the street belongs to the neighbourhood we are interested in. A tooltip option is provided to help us keep track of the genus count.

Finding out the Block and Street Location

The on street analysis alone doesn't give the full picture, since they may not be even on the same block. So, grouping the data to include the block information would help us to get a better idea of the exact location where we would be able to find the trees.

From the above data it can be seen that the top 5 spots to see the fall colors would be in 7700th butler st, 100th athletes way, 1400th E 20th Av, 7700th Sparbrook crescent and 3500 W 30th Av. Similarly, the spring bloom can be observed on the 7700th butler st, 1400th E 20TH Av, 7700th SPARBROOK CRESCENT, 2300th HARRISON DRIVE and 4400 W 10TH Av.

Now let's plot the exact location where we could see the group of trees to get the best view. The filtered dataframe for both spring and fall are plotted as shown.Eventhough the street block is given as an int value, we need to specify it as ordinal data, as it is the street block number, not a continuous value.

For both plots a tooltip is provided to get the exact location as it gives the information about neighbourhood name, street name and block number. Also, the radio buttons can be used to filter the plot for the desired genus. The genus count slider is useful to filter the plots for the number of genuses.

Discussion

This project work shows where in Vancouver someone could observe the best fall and spring colors.
The fall genus distribution map and the spring genus distribution map shows us the neighbourhoods where the most amount of tree genuses that causes the Fall Foliage and Spring Bloom are located. Since, the given dataset is a randomly sampled subset of the full dataset, the found observations may not be giving the actual reality. But, according to the data, the top 3 neighbourhoods to visit to experience the most of Fall Foliage in autumn would be Kensington-Cedar Cottage', 'Renfrew-Collingwood', 'Hastings-Sunrise'. Similarly, to observe Spring Bloom one should visit 'Renfrew-Collingwood', 'Hastings-Sunrise', 'Kensington-Cedar Cottage' neighbourhoods.

Now the distribution of the trees may not be uniform on the streets of these neighbourhoods, hence we looked at the streets with most foliage and blooms for fall and spring respectively. It was found that the streets with most genuses for fall and spring were not necessarily in the same top neighbourhoods as obtained earlier. There may be 2 reasons for the above observation :

  1. It can be because the data we are using is a subset of the original data,
  2. It can also be because, the trees may not be planted uniformly in the streets to give the overall counts.

The ultimate goal of this work is to find out the exact street location where we can observe uniform colors as given in Fig 1 and Fig 2. By doing the analysis on the given data set, we found out the neighbourhood, street and block where we can find the genuses of the same kind to get that beautiful view. From the analysis, 7700th butler st, 100th athletes way, 1400th E 20th Ave takes the podium to observe the fall colors and 7700th butler st, 1400th E 20TH Av, 7700th SPARBROOK CRESCENT to observe the spring bloom.

The scope of this work would be to include the full dataset and do the analysis again to find adjacent blocks where the bloom continues on. With the given dataset, to name one for each season, I have found 2 adjacent blocks in the Renfrew-Collingwood neighbourhood at 3500 Tanner St and 3600 Tanner St to observe spring bloom and in Dunbar-Southlands at 3400 W33RD AV and 3500 W33RD AV for fall colors. From living in Vancouver for the past 3 year, I know that there are more streets like this and no of adjacent blocks is more than 2. Another scope would be to observe the height range and diameter of trees in each block to observe if they have similar dimensions. It would be interesting to do the same analysis by grouping the data set for the common name for the trees.

Dashboard

1. Spring Genus Map and Genus Distributions

The following dashboard gives the spring map along with the genus distribution for all genuses and the genus distribution for top genuses in spring.

2. Fall Genus Map and Genus Distributions

Similar to the spring dashboard this dashboard gives the fall map along with the genus distribution for all genuses and the genus distribution for top genuses in fall.

3. Combined Fall and Spring Location Distribution

The following dashboard gives the combined plot for spring and fall to find the exact location of the genuses in each neighbourhood.

References

Not all the work in this notebook is original. Parts that were borrowed from other resources are as follows:

Resources Used